Product Engineer

Cologne, Germany (Hybrid)

Team: Product & Engineering · Reports to: CTO · Format: Full-time, permanent

Own a piece of the product, not a ticket queue

ilert is the alerting, on-call and incident response platform that engineering teams worldwide rely on when things break. That covers alerting, on-call scheduling, call routing, status pages, and an AI SRE that investigates incidents alongside the people responding to them.

We're bootstrapped, profitable, and small (~15 engineers). Your work reaches customers fast, and you have a real say in what gets built.

We're looking for a Product Engineer to own one area of that product. We'll give you a domain, not a spec. You figure out what customers need, build it across the stack, ship it, and check whether it made a difference.

We build with AI every day. But AI is leverage on top of engineering, not a substitute for it. We're looking for a solid engineer first, someone who uses AI to move faster, not to skip understanding the code.

Tasks

• Own a product domain end-to-end. Depending on where you'll have the most impact, that could be alerting, on-call and call routing, status pages, integrations, or our AI SRE. You propose what to build, build it, and measure whether it worked.

• Ship across the stack. Java and Rust on the backend, React and TypeScript on the frontend. We work in 2-week bets that end in a production deploy.

• Talk to customers. Join customer calls, read support conversations, dig into usage data, and turn what you learn into product improvements.

• Make the scope calls. Decide what to cut, what ships first, and what to validate before building it. We trust you with these trade-offs.

• Own it in production. You're responsible for what you ship, including when it breaks. Reliability is literally our product.

What you bring

• 2+ years of software engineering in a team codebase. That means code review, tests, production incidents, and code you didn't write alone. Side projects are great, but they don't replace this.

• You've shipped features end-to-end and cared whether people actually used them.

• Comfortable across the stack. Strong on one side, and willing and able to work on the other.

• Solid fundamentals. Data modeling, debugging, testing, and thinking through failure modes. You can read unfamiliar code and reason about it before you reach for a prompt.

• Real AI fluency. You use AI coding tools every day, you know where they help and where they mislead, and you can defend a design decision without "the AI suggested it."

• Product instinct. You have opinions about what to build, not just how.

• Comfortable with ambiguity. A domain and a problem are enough for you to get going.

• Fluent English (our working language).

• Able to be in our Cologne office 3 days a week.

Bonus

• Experience at a B2B SaaS or developer-tools company

• Exposure to incident management, DevOps, SRE or on-call, or just real curiosity about it. The domain is learnable; we care more about how you build.

• Hands-on with Java, Rust, React or TypeScript

• Something you built that other people actually use (open source, a side project, an internal tool)

• German language skills

Benefits

• 🧭 Real Ownership: You decide what to build in your domain, not just how to build it.

• ⚡ Ship Fast, See Impact: 2-week cycles with production deploys. Your work reaches customers in weeks, not quarters.

• 🤖 AI in Production: Build on and next to an AI SRE that investigates real incidents for real customers. Human-AI collaboration in production, not a demo.

• 🏡 Hybrid Freedom: Our office in Cologne Rheinauhafen with a roof terrace (3 days/week), plus work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

• 🌴 Focus > Meetings: We protect maker time, write things down async (Notion, Loom), and keep meetings rare.

• 🎯 Direct Line to the Founders: You report to the CTO and work directly with the CEO on what to build.

• 💪 Independent and Stable: Bootstrapped and profitable. We build for customers, not for the next funding round.

How to apply

No cover letter needed. Send your CV along with:

• One link to something you shipped and are proud of (a product, a feature, a repo or a write-up), plus a sentence on what your part in it was.

• A few lines on which part of ilert you'd want to own first, and why.

If you're the kind of engineer who has opinions about what to build, not just how to build it, we want to talk to you.

Keywords: Product Engineer, Full-Stack Engineer, Software Engineer, Java, Rust, React, TypeScript, B2B SaaS, Köln.

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